There has been a plethora of social care papers from governments of all stripes in recent years. The planned green paper on care and support for older people – due next summer – is the 13th, so you’d be forgiven for taking this latest review with a pinch of salt.

Yet there is a feeling that the stress on services cannot go on much longer. County areas are withstanding some of the greatest pressures in delivering and procuring social care services, and have had some of the biggest cuts in core government grants.

If there was an easy answer, we would not have reached social care paper number 13. Any solution must have a long-term vision, but early noises suggest next summer’s review could have a narrow focus on funding options for older people.

Exploring a wide range of options to ensure long-term sustainable funding – to meet the £1bn funding gap counties face in delivering social care and to protect individuals from huge care costs – is paramount.

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While this is clearly crucial, the County Councils Network (CCN) is also arguing for a more holistic approach, bringing together prevention, housing, workforce and integration as well as a sustainable way to fund social care.

We are arguing for a culture shift, turning the existing system on its head. It is currently too focused on dealing with issues as they arise rather than exploring ways to mitigate an individual’s health troubles. Who wouldn’t want to live healthily and independently for longer?

The media focus on delayed discharges highlights the reactionary nature of the system. We must shift thinking towards preventing people from entering hospital unnecessarily and enabling them to be in control of decisions about the type and location of their care.

Housing reform will play a big part in this shift of mindset. Enabling people to stay at home and receive care is hampered by the lack of adaptable housing, while for those leaving hospital, there are not enough reablement and rehabilitation services in England.

The green paper should seek to encourage more development of supported and retirement homes, including reforms to the planning process to incentivise the building of these properties.

The integration of health and social care has been labelled a solution, especially in reducing demand, yet for a variety of reasons implementation has been slow and inconsistent. Full integration by 2020 – as originally planned – is unlikely to happen, so we should consider reforms to the way the system works.

Instead of gunning for wholesale change in a short timeframe, the government should consider pooling NHS and social care budgets as a precursor to full integration. Some counties already do; with councils and local NHS providers making joint decisions based around the individual with the aim of keeping people out of hospital for longer.

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At the same time, the NHS tariff – which rewards acute trusts for patient contacts rather than outcomes – should be reviewed with the aim of rewarding providers for preventing people from entering crisis care unnecessarily.

In essence, we should try to build a preventive ecosystem that allows people to maintain their health for longer. This means widening the debate to include tightening the links between adult and children’s social care and, crucially, public health services.

It should also aim to ensure that those in the system live as independently as possible. Here, having consistency in care workers is vital. Yet Brexit could impact on the workforce, not least in areas such as Essex, where a third of care home workers are EU nationals. CCN is calling for flexibility in immigration rules to allow providers to recruit from Europe should they be unable to from the UK.

There is no silver bullet for making social care sustainable. No one is under any illusion about how difficult this task is for a government, least of all an administration that does not have parliamentary arithmetic on its side.

But without thinking long term, and a culture shift that brings prevention into focus, the green paper could ultimately go the same way as its predecessors.